Images can prove to be a powerful tactic to increase SEO traffic. Currently, almost 23% of all searches are image based. People worldwide search for images and click on them nearly 1 billion times daily on Google. This equals approximately 11k per second.
Search engines like Google often display images before regular web pages in the search results. If you want images to rank, you need to include alternative text, commonly known as alt text, alt attributes, or alt tag, in the HTML code to describe the images on a client’s web page.
Alt attributes provide context for search engine crawlers, helping them understand what an image is all about. They also make the content more accessible, inclusive, and easy to comprehend for readers. Therefore, optimizing image alt tags can lead to a boost in traffic from Google Images as well as the Google search engine.
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Importance of Alt Text
#1- Improved Website Accessibility
Websites attract all kinds of visitors. Out of the millions of visually impaired people, many tech-savvy ones use screen readers to enjoy online content.
Adding images to blogs, product pages, and posts encourages people to engage with them. In the absence of alt tags, screen readers would skip images or read out unhelpful file names, which often don’t depict the images correctly.
Well-chosen images not only back the message but adding a small description as an alt text also makes it accessible for visually impaired visitors. And enhanced website accessibility means a wider reach and more people finding the shared information valuable, which can improve ranking on the SERPs.
#2- Boosted SEO Ranking
When search engine bots read the alt tags on an image, they instantly understand what it is about. They can index and rank the images properly on the Google Images search engine, the second-largest search platform in the world. This means adding keywords to the alt text is a smart SEO move as it allows you to drive traffic for clients’ websites from Google Images.
#3- Enhanced User Experience
Developers sometimes enable the ‘lazy load’ feature on web pages. Alt tags help viewers understand what the image on the page will be about, giving them a holistic user experience, even as the website is loading. Alternative texts also serve as anchor texts for image links. These refer to the clickable text that links a web page to another.
Writing Effective Alt Texts
Using a natural conversational tone of voice is important when writing descriptive alt texts, but don’t forget to communicate with brevity.
Close your eyes to visualize the image in your head and describe the image as if you’re talking about it with someone who hasn’t seen it yet. It helps come up with a creative alt-text copy that accurately describes the elements of an image.
You can incorporate keywords but keep the description to the point while remaining precise and relevant so the crawlers and readers can both understand it accurately.
While alt tags should be crisp and short, ensure they’re grammatically correct. Check for capitalization and punctuation because they enhance the credibility and readability of any piece of content.
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Tips for Writing Compelling Alt Text
#1- Avoid Including CTA Marketing Plugins
Many marketers add alt text copies to images to encourage people to book the service or buy the product. The practice does more harm than good because crawlers can flag it. The sole purpose of alt tags is to define an image with as much accuracy as possible. However, while it also serves as an SEO plugin, don’t forget the importance of descriptive alt text when writing copies for it.
#2- Use One Primary Keyword
SEO specialists at our white-label digital marketing agency believe the importance of alt text is somewhat underrated. They urge adding the main keyword to the alt tags as long as it provides a context for the content or web page the image is used on.
Since alt texts are meant to provide additional context and information, target keywords are often a suitable way to achieve that. You can also use variations of the primary keyword to make it more natural.
#3- Avoid Including Alt Tags for Decorative Images
Alt text provides in-depth context for images, but some decorative images, such as horizontal line page breaks and icons, don’t need further explanation. Even those using screen readers do not really need to know what the images look like because they’re not crucial in helping them understand the content on the page. And search engine bots also don’t need this additional context or information to rank the web page.
#4- Stick to the Ideal Character Length
You must limit the alt text description to 125 characters, including punctuation, spaces, and numbers. Longer alt text copies can be distracting, taking away the purpose: to make images used to make the content engaging and appealing a lot more understandable.
Keeping alt-tag descriptions short and crisp will help retain the purpose and improve user experience. Since the character length is limited, try avoiding filler text like ‘image of’ or ‘picture of’ so space isn’t wasted. Google bots and users both already know they’re images, so there’s no need to clarify this any further.
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